Fox News host Dana Perino on Wednesday put House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on the hot seat over revelations that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is being probed by the FBI for potential sex trafficking charges.
While appearing on Fox News, McCarthy was reminded by Perino of his past statements that Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) should be removed from the House Intelligence Committee after revelations that a suspected Chinese spy had infiltrated his office.
“So by that same logic, will you take any action to remove Matt Gaetz from the Judiciary Committee while he’s under investigation by the DOJ over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him?” she asked. Continue reading.
“Emmer declined to say how he personally felt about using stolen information during a campaign”
SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA – In a story published by Roll Call, Rep. Tom Emmer, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), refused to enter into an agreement with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) not to use hacked or stolen information in campaigns. The DCCC renewed their attempts to come to an agreement after President Trump admitted he’d be willing to accept campaign intelligence from foreign governments.
Donald Trump routinely criticizes the media, attacks long-standing American institutions, diverts attention from serious issues that affect all Americans, insults anyone who criticizes him or his ideas and lavishes praise on dictators. He contributes to and encourages divisiveness and animosity in our country.
What can we actually do to stop or curtail Trump’s regressive agenda, since he will likely be around for several years? The answer is quite simple. First, we need to think about and act on the following critical issues that impact all of us, which Trump and his avid supporters champion but are not supported by most Americans.
The following article by Eric Boehlert was posted on the ShareBlue.com website September 7, 2018:
Republicans refuse to rule out help from Russians.
Republicans blew up long-running negotiations with Democrats this week, after both sides worked quietly for months to come to a bipartisan agreement not to use hacked or stolen information in the upcoming campaign season.
In a proposal that had been on the table, both parties agreed not to help any hacking efforts and not to search out hacked or stolen materials, and they also agreed to report any contacts with foreign operatives to law enforcement.
The GOP’s decision to abruptly end talks “only fed the complaint by Democrats that Republican lawmakers have resisted bridging partisan divisions in the two years since Russia began its brazen attack on the American political system,” the New York Times reported.
The following article by Katherine Tully-McManus was posted on the Roll Call website September 4, 2018:
Case was referred to panel by independent Office of Congressional Ethics
The House Ethics Committee has taken up a case against Rep. Rod Blum, R-Iowa, that was referred by the independent Office of Congressional Ethics. Credit: Bill Clark, CQ Roll Call file photo
The House Ethics Committee has taken up an inquiry into Iowa Republican Rod Blum. The case was referred from the Office of Congressional Ethics on July 19, and the Ethics Committee will announce a course of action before Dec. 17, according to a release.
Blum called the inquiry a “crusade of personal destruction” being waged against him by the “radical left.”
“In my case they scream ‘ETHICS VIOLATION!’ over a clerical error on a form. Once this minor error was brought to my attention, I immediately self-reported to the Ethics Committee and apologized,” Blum said in a statement. He said that between 30 percent and 50 percent of all reports reviewed by the Ethics Committee contain errors, data that Roll Call was not able to confirm.
The following article by Tommy Christopher was posted on the ShareBlue.com website August 30, 2018:
Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) is accused of raiding campaign funds for personal use, including a purchase of fossils to allegedly help him “understand climate science.”
Rep. John Culberson, R-TX Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)
Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) is the subject of complaints to the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) questioning almost $50,000 in campaign spending on items like civil war memorabilia, coins, and other collectibles.
According to the Houston Chronicle, the complaint says Culberson spent the funds on items reported as “books,” “research materials,” and “gifts” that were in reality antiques, military collectibles, Civil War memorabilia, and even “a $309 purchase at the Black Hills Institute, which sells and rents fossils.”
The following article by Griffin Connolly was posted on the Roll Call website August 29, 2018:
Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-VA,, above, and Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-MD, want the acting US Postal Service inspector general to investigate the improper release of information on a Democratic congressional candidate in Virginia. Credit: Tom Williams, CQ Roll Call file photo
The top Democrats on the House Oversight Committee want the U.S. Postal Service to investigate how a Paul Ryan-aligned super PAC obtained a Virginia Democratic congressional candidate’s unredacted federal security clearance application.
The Congressional Leadership Fund, which is closely affiliated with House GOP leadership and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, and America Rising, a conservative opposition research group, have said the copy of the form was obtained through a standard Freedom of Information Act request to the National Personnel Records Center, which then kicked it over to the USPS to process and respond.
Roll Call has reviewed and verified the documents related to America Rising’s FOIA request initially filed on July 9 and the shipment of the materials from the USPS human resources department on July 30. America Rising then turned those documents over to CLF.
The following article by Stephanie Akin was posted on the Roll Call website August 23, 2018:
Democrats have seized on reports questioning Rep. Vern Buchanan’s 2017 yacht purchase as they look for an advantage in the race for Florida’s 16th district. Credit: Bill Clark, CQ Roll Call
The new yacht smell has barely worn off of Vern Buchanan’s 73-foot ocean liner. But it is causing the Florida congressman’s re-election campaign to take on water this week, after a report raising questions about the seven-figure bank loan Buchanan used to finance the vessel.
It is unclear how much drag the episode will have on Buchanan’s campaign. Inside Elections with Nathan Gonzales ranks the district Likely Republican. But Democrats, seeing an opportunity to throw the six-term incumbent off course, bore down.
The following article by Jim Tankersley was posted on the New York TImes website December 4, 2017:
As the Senate prepared to vote on its tax bill, Republican Senators criticized the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation over its analysis that the bill would increase the deficit by $1 trillion. Credit Tom Brenner/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — A Republican requirement that Congress consider the full cost of major legislation threatened to derail the party’s $1.5 trillion tax rewrite last week. So lawmakers went on the offensive to discredit the agency performing the analysis.
In 2015, Republicans changed the budget rules in Congress so that official scorekeepers would be required to analyze the potential economic impact of major legislation when determining how it would affect federal revenues.
But on Thursday, hours before they were set to vote on the largest tax cut Congress has considered in years, Senate Republicans opened an assault on that scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, and its analysis, which showed the Senate plan would not, as lawmakers contended, pay for itself but would add $1 trillion to the federal budget deficit.
Public statements and messaging documents obtained by The New York Times show a concerted push by Republican lawmakers to discredit a nonpartisan agency they had long praised. Party leaders circulated two pages of “response points” that declared “the substance, timing and growth assumptions of J.C.T.’s ‘dynamic’ score are suspect.” Among their arguments was that the joint committee was using “consistently wrong” growth models to assess the effect the tax cuts would have on hiring, wages and investment.
The Republican response points go after revenue analyses by the committee and by the Congressional Budget Office, which scores other legislation, saying their findings “can be off to the tune of more than $1.5 trillion over ten years.”
The swift backlash helped defuse concerns about the deficit impact long enough for the bill to pass by a vote of 51 to 49. Some deficit hawks in the Senate caucus were sufficiently concerned about the report on Thursday night to delay the tax vote by a day, but the only Republican lawmaker to vote no was Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, whose last-minute efforts to cut the size of the package or otherwise offset the deficit impact were unsuccessful.
Instead, Senate Republicans questioned the timing of the analysis’ release on Thursday, and a spokeswoman for the Senate Finance Committee released a statement saying the findings are “curious and deserve further scrutiny.”
Republicans say the committee’s model underestimates how workers will respond to lower taxes and how private investment affects growth. They also say the model assumes that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates faster than Republican lawmakers expect, which would make borrowing more expensive and could slow economic growth.
That sentiment was repeated over and over, before and after the vote. “We think they lowballed it,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the majority whip, told reporters on Thursday. On Sunday, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said on CNN that “there’s no doubt that the J.C.T. has been consistently underestimating the activity in our economy.”
In the final hours before and after the bill passed, party leaders insisted that the tax plan would produce enough economic growth to pay for themselves with additional tax revenue from growing businesses and higher-paid workers. “I’m totally confident this is a revenue-neutral bill,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, told reporters early Saturday morning after the vote, adding that he believed the bill would actually be a “revenue producer.”
Yet there was no data to support those claims, despite promises by the Trump administration that such an analysis would be forthcoming. The Treasury, whose secretary, Steven Mnuchin, has said repeatedly that his department was working on an analysis to show how the tax cuts would not add to the deficit, has not produced any studies that back up those claims. Last week, the Treasury’s inspector general said it was opening an inquiry into the department’s analysis of the tax plan.
The attack on the joint committee and its analysis is a change from the praise Republicans have long heaped on the body, which is staffed with economists and other career bureaucrats who analyze legislation in depth.
“The people who prepare our cost estimates are the best in the business, and they’ve been working on this issue for years,” Republicans on the House Budget Committee said on a page that was restored to the committee’s website on Monday afternoon, after what staff members said was an accidental deletion during a site redesign this year.
At stake in the debate is more than the reputation of the economic analysts whose lifeblood is understanding the vagaries and intersections of the federal budget and tax code.
If Republicans are wrong and the joint committee is correct, the tax bill will add to an already worsening fiscal forecast in the United States. The federal government is already running an annual deficit of nearly $700 billion. The amount of federal debt has surpassed $20 trillion, and it is projected to grow by another $10 trillion over the next decade as government safety net spending rises because of retiring baby boomers and increasing health care costs.
The joint committee did find that the tax bill would rev up economic growth but, like other studies, it would not be enough to offset the loss of tax revenue. The analysis found growth from the tax cuts would offset $458 billion in lost revenue, but $51 billion of that would be eaten up by additional interest costs on money the United States would need to borrow to pay for the plan. That would leave just $407 billion to offset a nearly $1.5 trillion tax cut, the committee found.
Other independent analyses echo the joint committee’s findings. The Tax Foundation, which tends to find high growth effects from tax cuts, projected the House version of the tax bill would increase deficits by about $1 trillion after factoring in economic growth. The Tax Policy Center, which tends to find much smaller effects, estimated the deficit increase at nearly $1.5 trillion. So did the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which is run by a former Bush administration economist, Kent A. Smetters.
Both the Penn model and the Tax Policy Center’s model found the Senate version would increase deficits by more than $1 trillion after accounting for growth; the Penn model in particular produced a near-identical score to the joint committee’s. The Tax Foundation did not complete an analysis of the Senate bill as amended in committee, when senators made several large changes to the bill including sunsetting its tax cuts for individuals in 2025.
Until Thursday, though, Republicans could dismiss those findings by pointing to the lack of analysis from the joint committee. The House bill was passed two weeks after it was introduced, before the committee could issue a so-called dynamic score of the bill, one that estimates the legislation’s cost in light of its effect on the economy. When the Senate analysis was finally released, Republicans, who pushed the bill through Congress at such lightning-fast speed that the final bill had handwritten changes in the margins, questioned the timing.
“How is it,” they wrote in their response points, “that J.C.T. found the time to produce and make public its macroeconomic analysis of the Senate bill, when it has yet to produce the same analysis of the House bill that passed weeks ago.”
In a November 28 email shared with The New York Times, the committee’s chief of staff, Thomas A. Barthold, said the committee had suspended its work on the House bill dynamic score in hopes of producing an analysis of the Senate bill before a final vote.
Looking at the calendar, Mr. Barthold wrote, “I made the decision to have my macro colleagues devote their time to producing a macroeconomic estimate of the Finance bill in time for the Finance Committee’s report (in this we failed) or in time for the Senate’s debate on the legislation. My colleagues and I reasoned that we could then return to complete work on H.R. 1” — the House bill — “and with good fortune have the two analyses available for a potential conference.”
The blowback came, in part, from lingering anger over unfavorable analyses of Republican health care plans by the budget office earlier this year, according to a Republican Senate aide. A finding that contradicted their philosophical belief that tax cuts will generate significant growth and revenues inflamed their suspicions.
Instead, they found comfort in ballpark estimates offered by some conservative economists, that the tax bill could increase the size of the economy by as much as 4 percent over a decade, or 0.4 percent a year. Mr. Smetters, of Penn, said that number is actually much higher — that the economy would need to grow by at least an additional 0.57 percent a year for tax cuts to pay for themselves.
Not even the most optimistic analysis of the Senate bill projected it would unleash anywhere close to that rate of additional growth.
“Emmer declined to say how he personally felt about using stolen information during a campaign”
Republicans refuse to rule out help from Russians.
